Sunday, March 17, 2013

The Gospel According To John Coetzee

In the beginning was the title and it was The Childhood of Jesus, and those who
looked upon it saw that it was a light that illuminates the new novel by J.M.
Coetzee.

And though many of Coetzee’s earlier titles are terse
(Boyhood, Youth, Disgrace), some are resonant
(Waiting for the Barbarians) and some
ironically apt (Foe). But the name of
his new work is both simple and skilful.

For once again Coetzee puts aside autobiography and
anti-fiction and returns to allegory, using a simple style that reaches the
realm of parable. All of which is entirely fitting, given his subject. And in
the novel, the characters of the middle-aged Simón and his five-year-old ward
David arrive in the township of Novilla in an unnamed country in a quest for
David’s missing mother.

And Simon discovers that Novilla is governed by
rules different from those he’s known before. Daily allowances and accommodation
are freely available and residents are driven by kinship, not competition. As
he’s told: “People here have washed themselves clean of old ties. You should be
doing the same: letting go of old attachments, not pursuing them”.

And the spirit of Kafka moves upon the early part of
the book as man and boy try to make sense of the egalitarian yet bureaucratic
nature of their new world. Given that the citizens speak Spanish, it could well
be that Cuba was what Coetzee had in mind.

It comes to pass that Simón finds work as a
stevedore, then meets a strange woman named Inés, whom he instinctively feels
will make a good mother to David. And Inés takes over maternal duties towards
the boy who is described as magical on more than one occasion, and both decide
to nurture his other-worldly qualities.

And Coetzee gives names to his characters that are
as significant as his title. Simon is also the first name of the Apostle Peter,
the so-called rock upon which Jesus built his church; Inés comes from the Greek
for “holy”, and she is described as “the virginal type”; and David is mentioned
in the gospels as an ancestor of Jesus.

Now, while the writing style is simple, what it
contains can be subversive. A neighbour’s son is called Fidel and a faithful
dog answers to Bolivar. For the Latin American Liberator’s first name was Simón, too. And David is inspired by reading Don Quixote – written by a “man named Benengeli” -- especially the
knight-errant’s habit of mistaking the objects of his imagination for reality.

And to further drive home the point, there are
loaves, fishes and a sinister Senor Daga who tries to lead David into
temptation. Though there is also much that seems inspired by Buddhism. The
benevolent residents of Novilla philosophise freely, and have the habit of uttering
statements such as: “This endless dissatisfaction, this yearning for the
something-more that is missing, is a way of thinking we are well rid of.”

But there are also moments of great peculiarity,
such as a discussion with David on the one-ness of human excreta: “Once it gets
into the sewer pipes it is no one’s poo…it joins all the other people’s poo and
becomes general poo”. Later on, there’s
an invisibility cloak, which strikes an incongruous, Potter-ish note in a novel
such as this.

And having finished the book, one recalls the first
chapter of Elizabeth Costello in
which Coetzee writes that novels of realism aren’t the best way to put forward
ideas, because such ideas have to be embodied in characters.Which could explain
the writer’s attraction to the allegory, a form that yokes together idea and
character.

Verily, with The
Childhood of Jesus, Coetzee offers an ingenious reassembly of the roots of
one of the world’s dominant religions. The new Pope ought to read it.